Former Intel executive Les Vadasz has decided to join the board of directors of a molecular memory company. Vadasz was one of Intel's first employees, joining the company in 1968. He recently retired from Intel and is now working for Zettacore as a member of the company's board of directors. Zettacore hopes to create molecular memories based on multi-porphyrin nanostructures. Zettacore claims that:

The molecules, called multi-porphyrin nanostructures, can be oxidized and reduced (electrons removed or replaced) in a way that is stable, reproducible, and reversible. In this way, molecules can be used as reliable memory locations for electronic devices. In many ways, each molecule acts like an individual capacitor device, similar to a conventional capacitor, but storing only a few electrons of charge that are accessible only at specific, quantized voltage levels. The key difference between ZettaCore memory and conventional memory is that as the size of a memory element becomes smaller, the properties of semiconductor or polymer materials change in undesirable ways, while the properties of our molecular capacitors remain the same. This allows scaling to very small size elements.

Zettacore boasts that within a decade molecular storage chips will be commonplace. This highly questionable prediction (speed, fabrication, and reliability issues abound) apparently sparked Mr. Vadasz's interest, and Zettacore has been successful in garnering venture funding. Mr. Vadasz will remain as a corporate board member emeritus at Intel, which undoubtedly wants to track this technology. Although Intel has traditionally scorned non-silicon computing technologies, its stance has recently changed. Intel now funds university molecular electronics research programs, and concedes that non-silicon technologies (such as carbon nanotubes) might possibly play a role in the future of computing.

USER COMMENTS 9 comment(s)

molecular memory sounds likely!(9:59am EST Thu Dec 18 2003)

No one can schedule the future, but this technology has a lot of momentum and it would not surprize me a bit if it was common place in ten years!

Go Zettacore and the plethera of other molecular electronics companies!

- by Peter.

the smaller it gets(10:34am EST Thu Dec 18 2003)the harder it will be to make on a consistent basis…but let's talk about prototypes before we talk about production…has the company hand built a working prototype yet? - by soc+

RE: soc+(10:59am EST Thu Dec 18 2003)So true - by A Better World

wave of the future(11:16am EST Thu Dec 18 2003)Honestly I can't wait to get into that feild of research and development, and I think it's already been tested, I read something similar in a Time article, they called them Qbits. - by Marco

A threat to the enviroment …(1:39pm EST Thu Dec 18 2003)Adding extra electrons to a atom? This is clearly a danger. Look what happen when we added crap to our air and our water this must be stopped. - by LOL

Interesting stuff, really(3:28pm EST Thu Dec 18 2003)Porphyrins were very interesting compounds, 'way back when I was a UCBerkeley chem undergrad. One of a class of unique organics that are very symmetric, and have unusual 'd' and 'pi' bonding that allows all sorts of electron mobility that otherwise wouldn't occur. One of my classmates did a project marrying porphyrins to lanthanides as ligand-bound nanostructures. Neat colored precipitates.

The simplest common organo-metallic ligand is that old stand by, Ferric ferrocynate [prussian blue]. Ferrocynate has an iron atom completely surrounded by 4 cynates (CNO) in a tetrahedral pattern. Completely “shielded”, it behaves like a separate ion in its own right [not a ligand]. Like the NH4 “ammonium” anion, the N03 “nitrate” cation, and so on. Coupled with trivalent ferric iron, it forms a deeply blue colored compound that is very stable [prussian blue], and sort of “half organic” and half inorganic. Ligands!

In any case, ligand-coupled heavy metals [especially the lanthanides, which do most of their chemical bonding dirty-work through 'd' and even 'f' hetereoresonance mechanisms], bound to highly symmetric porphyrin-ring systems are both extremely stable, essentially insoluable, and very susceptible to subtle oxidation-state changes through added and subtracted free electrons.

So, the italicized clipping makes sense. It also makes sense that the porphyrins electronic properties extend down to 'molecule scales'. SOC+ is right: it would be nice to see devices. Yet, I should think that they're coming. “molecular memory” stuff, whether it be the almost mythical 'plastic' memory junction material, or the FLASH cells, or molecular inter-gap bit-stuff … whatever it is, in the end the ability of a cell to hold a value will depend on the long term stability of the state-storing properties of the material, AND (big and!) the state-of-the-art of photolithography/nanoimprinting of the day. See … “wires” still need to get the data to and from each cell. And if “wires” are the limit, then most of this will still remain photolithographically limited.

[It makes an awefully good argument for "2.5D" memory, which has a few hundred to a thousand layers, but millions of "cells on a side"]

- by GoatGuy

Yeah Goatguy(11:57pm EST Thu Dec 18 2003)I'm so proud to be a chemist like GoatGuy. Yeah chemists! Here's a bit more about porphyins: our blood is full of them. In fact blood (hemoglobin actually) functions on porphyin-Fe complex binding O2. There may someday be a connection between breathing and computing. Imagine that. - by BEN

MRAM vs MM(2:23pm EST Tue Feb 10 2004)I work on MRAMs and if these claims are true, then I guess a molecuar memory would have an edge as far as storage density is concerened. But how stable is the carge retention in a porphyrin moecule ? - by Leowiz